The Brave New World.4            Roger Ray      March 25, 2018
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    A computer that dispenses expert radiology advice is just one example of how jobs currently done by highly trained white-collar workers can be automated, thanks to the advance of deep learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. The idea that manual work can be carried out by machines is already familiar; now ever-smarter machines can perform tasks done by information workers, too. What determines vulnerability to automation, experts say, is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar but whether or not it is routine. Machines can already do many forms of routine manual labor, and are now able to perform some routine cognitive tasks too. As a result, says Andrew Ng, a highly trained and specialized radiologist may now be in greater danger of being replaced by a machine than his own executive assistant: “She does so many different things that I don’t see a machine being able to automate everything she does any time soon.”    THE ECONOMIST Jun 25th 2016

  

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the basement floor of my early childhood home and watching my mother run the wash through the hand cranked wringer on the top of the washing machine. Such a machine would have seemed primitive to anyone living just ten years later but in the mid-1950’s it was a step up from a scrub board and a wash bucket. 

 

My parents did their homework by the light of oil lanterns,

they commuted to school either on foot or on horseback,

their homes were heated with wood,

and a good deal of farm life still involved milking cows  by hand and harnessing a mule to plow. 

The innovations of modernity held the promise of an easier life. Labor saving inventions allowed you to cook without chopping wood. To vacuum a rug rather than dragging it outside and beating it in the wind. I remember our first washing machine and dryer, our first dish washer, and our first microwave oven. Life, for middle class Americans, went through an evolution in the 60’s and 70’s that took a lot of time-consuming drudgery out of life and made our homes safer and more comfortable.

I was in grad school when computers became a part of a private citizen’s life. I no longer had to type my many papers with a carbon paper between two sheets of paper. No more correction tape or white out. My first computer immediately saved me about 15 or 20 hours a week of tedious work. 

But “labor saving” can mean different things. It can mean that our daily lives are less labor intensive and more comfortable and it can mean that many occupations become irrelevant. Twenty years ago, I had three secretaries managing the record keeping, finances, and communications in the church where I was the pastor. Ten years ago we were down to two and we were looking for things to keep them busy. In the life of our little church, we have never had a secretary because the internet and computer programs have made communication and record keeping so much more simple that I probably don’t spend more than a day every week doing what I used to have three full-time staff members doing. 

Automation and innovation are taking jobs out of our economy that were once assumed to be fixtures. Christmas shopping on the internet was a novelty a decade ago, now, many of you have not seen the inside of our local mall for years. When you go to the grocery store, you are more and more likely to have to either use an automated checkout register or use an ap on your phone so that you never even have to slow down to deal with an actual employee or even an automated check-out station. 

The harnessing of electricity and the invention of modern automobiles and airplanes changed the world. Then came automation in manufacturing. Then the whole world of computers and the internet. These have all brought adjustments in employment and have shifted economic resources.

President Trump has vowed to bring back coal mining jobs which necessarily means two things: the first is that Donald Trump has never been in a coal mine and knows absolutely nothing about them.

The second is that he has no idea how coal in mined now.

It is not simply that coal is being replaced by other cleaner and cheaper energy sources, but what coal that is being mined is being mined by powerful robots that can do the work of hundreds of coal miners. Those jobs are gone forever. And frankly, no one is going to miss them because they were dangerous and horrible jobs.

The problem is that no good paying union jobs have come along to take their place.

Artificial intelligence now both promises and threatens a fourth wave of major changes, changes that can usher in a time of human leisure, or it could force more people into abject poverty. What is certainly true is that we have a lot more people in the labor force than we actually need to provide food, shelter, and services to our population.

At the time of the Civil War, there were only about 30 million people in America and still the agricultural south was dependent upon slave labor to be able to feed and clothe the population. Now we have more than 10 times as many people but fewer people working in agriculture. As the population of America as grown by hundreds of millions of people, there are now fewer people living in rural Missouri than there was in 1860.

Science fiction writers tend to be the prophets of the future and they tend to see a future in one of two flavors. Gene Rodenberry envisioned Star Trek, he conceived of a world in which there was no currency. No one got paid because resources were shared as needed and everyone had everything they needed.

But, as we saw in the recent Hunger Games series, futurists much more often envision a much more bleak future. In fact, you almost never hear the word “dystopian” except in a description of some Science Fiction vision of a dire future filled with violence, poverty, hunger, and government oppression.

Innovation can give us a future in which the human mind is set free from the mundane tasks of mere survival so that we can explore space, as well as create art, music, literature, and turn our minds to creativity and imagination. Or is can give us a future in which human beings are typically more trouble than they are worth and those few who are wealthy can do everything they can to defend their wealth and comfort against the hordes of the unwashed poor until they all die off.

 

I don’t often get to agree with the Catholic pope and I kinda hate that it has to be when the pontiff is talking about poop, but, yes, the issue here is unbridled capitalism.  In defense of the pope’s honor, he was technically quoting a phrase coined by the 4^th century Greek bishop, Basil of Caesarea, but the point is that an economy that is based solely upon greed is evil and the results of it will carry the stench of hellish sewage.

Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 novel, illustrated the fears Americans’ shared about the spread of socialism and communism in the early 20^th century. The very imaginative story showed how a revolution with good intentions becomes little more than a regime change, exchanging one kind of exploitative dictatorship for just a new set of dictators. If there is a moral to the story, it is saying to workers, “Be satisfied with your lot in life because if you organize and rebel, everything will end up being worse for you and other workers.”

That mentality has reigned supreme in both major political parties in the United States for almost a century. Only the desperation of the great depression and the threat of crushing poverty from WWII allowed for the creation of a social safety net of any sort in America but Franklin Roosevelt was often portrayed as being dangerously inclined towards socialism. By the 1960’s, when President Johnson tried to follow the lead of the rest of the civilized world in creating a national healthcare program, he was beaten back to the compromise of creating Medicare for the elderly, and Medicaid for the desperately poor, because insurance companies did not want to give up the profit they could make from people being sick.

The argument in Animal Farm is that socialism fails on two fronts, the first is that the powerful will always seek to claim the majority of goods for themselves, and the second, portrayed in the novel in true stereotype casting as a cat,  is that the lazy will always try to scam the system so that they can eat and be housed without providing any labor. And, any of us who have experience working with the poor know that you can find many sad examples of people who will do just that.

When I was first taking training in clinical counseling, the Bible of psychology, the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), contained a diagnosis called “An Entitlement Disorder,” which has now just been made an aspect of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but I think that most of us have seen it in action. It is true. Some people will scam the system to avoid work.

What is sad is that this popular prejudice against the poor and unproductive blinds people to the real scammers who are manipulating the marriage of democracy to unbridled capitalism to write themselves blank checks in the form of subsidies to already wildly profitable businesses, such as the oil and gas industry, and protection of the profits of pharmaceutical and insurance companies that profit off of illnesses.

One of President Trump’s recent screeds has been advocating the execution of drug dealers who are causing the tragically lethal opioid crisis in America. Which forces me to wonder which pharmaceutical CEO he wants to execute first?

There can be no denying that the rewards of capitalism can inspire innovation, invention, hard work, and personal responsibility. But without the balance of regulation that insure that the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, robotic labor-saving innovation, and technological advances redound to a better life for all of humanity, then the profit motive can dismiss the value of human life in favor of the value of money.

Examples abound but moral failure of Capitalism can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the American gun industry. Folks, during this century, terrorists have killed fewer than 4000 Americans and yet the fear of terrorists has spawned exponential government spending in Homeland Security to keep us safe from this threat. However, in this century, more than a half million Americans have been killed by domestic gun owners. You are a 200 times more likely to be killed by some local gun owner than you are by a terrorist but we don’t spend a dime protecting our own against this domestic blood bath because the gun industry is protecting their profits.

Since the tragic shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last month, a student led protest has arisen in which teenagers are telling us that we have failed them. And we have. We have failed to sensibly curb the murder rate in our nation because we have allowed the profit motive of the gun industry to trump the value of human life, allowing more than 30,000 people to be killed every year for nothing but money.

We have allowed the most morally depraved and the most psychopathic elements of our society to insist that their right to own weapons is more important that the lives of our school children, our families, our friends.

It is worth saying it again. Unbridled capitalism will destroy this nation. The difference between the two visions of our future, either a new world of human comfort and fulfillment, or a dire and violent world filled with hunger and ignorance rests in our willingness to make morality more important than profits.

Capitalism can be harnessed to create a better future but left without regulation, without a moral compass, it turns people into the raw material of printing money. Unbridled capitalism, the ceaseless and incessant greed of it has ruined our democracy, it is driving the destruction of our environment, it has driven our prison system into a concentration camp that holds two million Americans hostage to profits. It is impoverishing our schools, and rationing healthcare, and flooding our streets with guns. We can stop this, we can change the course of history, if we want to, if only we will do it.

We need to offer a universal basic income to everyone. Yes, there will be people who will play the Animal Farm cat role but that is their problem and not ours.

We need to have universal health care and we need to make state colleges and universities tuition free. We need to change our housing codes so that all new construction includes solar panels and plans for sustainable building.

We need to leave our coal and oil in the ground and harvest the energy of wind, waves, and sunlight so that future generations can live.

And we need to get money out of government so that the NRA can be relegated to the pages of history along with ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Nazis. None of this beyond our grasp. In fact, all of this is a part of the growing social conscience of Western Europe.

There will be several players needed in the infusion of conscience into our capitalism. It will take political leadership, education, and the networking of people of conscience in all walks of life.

I know that we seem to be small and fragile and that our future seems uncertain, but there has never been a time when America needed progressive communities of faith more than it needs us right now. The world needs for us to be courageous, prophetic, loud, and defiant because you just can’t stand idly by and hope for things to turn out well. Only your passionate involvement can keep our country from going off the rails. Together, we have hope.